Annette Messager

ANNETTE MESSAGER

"All the parts of one’s life, all the secrets, all the hopes, are in one’s clothes.”

Aperture: Let’s begin by talking a bit about your divided life as an artist, a collector, and so on.

Annette Messager: I give myself many titles. I wanted to be someone important, and the more titles we have, the more important we are. So I could be Annette Messager, Collector; Annette Messager, Trickster; Annette Messager, Practical Woman; Annette Messager, Artist. I think that we are many people at the same time.

A: Do you see this as a fragmentation or a synthesis?

AM: As a fragmentation—of time, and also as a fragmentation of the person... who is always, I believe, fragmented in a way. That’s also what I love about photography, that it’s a fragmented thing: you can either repeat it, multiply it, cut it, or reuse it. It moves along in time—as opposed to a drawing, which is always outside of time.

Along these lines, I have always been interested in taxidermy. For me, taxidermy and photography are the same thing: taxidermy takes an animal and freezes it, dead yet alive, forever. Photography also freezes—a sixtieth of a second—forever.

The person who is photographed is always killed in a way, fixed there for eternity. I think that photography has a lot to do with voyeurism. There is a kind of fetishism about photography that I find very compelling.

A: You see yourself as a trickster? How so?

AM: I believe that, first of all, every artist is something of a liar or a trickster. Artists play with reality, they make use of it, and at the same time, they are preserving it. Kafka said something great. Someone asked him what he thought about photography. He answered that photography is the trick you play on yourself. I did a series where I took some photos of bodies with little drawings on them. These were like games with the body, little fibs, or invented stories on the body. It’s playing with the meager stuff one has: one’s body, one’s minimal vocabulary. I like to work with the body, because it’s the one thing you possess, that you have from beginning to end.

A: Could you tell us about the series “History of Dresses”?

AM: For me, a dress, for the time it is worn, is like a second skin. It’s something that is really very close to the self, and that is loved. All the parts of one’s life, all the secrets, all the hopes, are in one’s clothes. A year or so later, it’s over, and you throw that skin away. So dresses, for me, are something very symbolic of the time of their wearing.

Diana Stoll